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Crystal worlds

A pleasant spin-off of my recent interest in drawing has been a certain heightened appreciation of the visual world. I find myself noticing things more, asking myself what the essence is of a particular scene, and how a person might go about capturing something of that essence on paper. This April I’ve been taken a special delight in the brightness and colour of Spring, and the intricate three-dimensional patterns of light and space made by new leaves and blossom on the branches of trees. No idea how to draw it really – impressionist smudges capture the colour and light, but can only hint at the spatial complexity – but just thinking about how it might be done makes me feel more part of it.

Serendipitous that at this point, I should take it into my head that I want to read more J.G.Ballard, and specifically The Crystal World:

The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water….

Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared , each sheathed in its armour of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels…

When Ballard imagines a forest where trees, birds, insects, crocodiles, people are slowly being encased in brilliant coloured crystals that pour out light, he’s describing a sensual delight that’s not so very different from what I am enjoying about the Spring. After all leaves and flowers – complex but endlessly repeated forms, built according to a hidden underlying algorithm – are not really such very different things from crystals.

Ballard referred to surrealists such as Max Ernst among the influences that shaped his work, and he is surely an exceptionally painterly writer, not only because of the attention he gives to visual effects, but also because he is more interested in spectacle and mood than he is in plot. Things happen in his books, but the events are pretty incidental to the evocation of his imagined world, and, insofar as there is movement, it is a movement inwards, a movement towards deeper engagement with what is there from the early pages of the book. Indeed the book itself seems to be about the allure of stasis. The crystals themselves are a product of the leaching away of time.

His is a strange kind of Spring, a Spring that runs joyfully, not towards summer, but towards a kind of shining death.

The EngLit gaze

Many years ago, I went through a phase of writing down all my dreams. I quickly got much better at remembering them, to the point where writing down a night’s dreams could take an hour or more and was becoming quite a chore. And then a weird thing happened: I began to dream about writing down my dreams. After a long and complicated dream, I would write it down, feel relieved that the chore was done, and then wake to find that not only did I have to write down the initial dream, but the bit about writing it down as well. The act of writing about the dreams, I realised, had changed the character of the dreams themselves, and I abandoned the project.

* * *

In this short article, I included the following quote from a book review by Rachel Cusk:

How does the novel become new again? One way is by its movement into fields of life not yet documented.

I’ve not read any of Rachel Cusk’s books, or anything by Jonathan Lethem who she was reviewing, but when I read this I was immediately struck by her notion that the purpose of a novel was to ‘document’ areas of life. It seemed to me an odd word and an odd conception of the function of fiction, and yet I felt I’d seen the same idea expressed in various ways many times before. And the more I thought about it, the more it struck me what a recent conception of literature that is. As I said in the article, it’s difficult to imagine that Shakespeare was trying to document anything.

Since writing the article, I’ve asked myself another question. Document for whom? Who is that looks at novels and works of literature as documentary records of their times? And the answer, it seemed to me, was academic students of literature. Of course if you study Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Virginia Woolf as an academic exercise, you inevitably read their work as, in part, a record of the times in which they were written, whether or not written with that intention.

EngLit as an academic subject is relatively recent, but many writers now, and particularly writers who aspire to write literature, have themselves studied it. Even if they haven’t studied it, writers who want to be admired and taken seriously are surely aware of its gaze, aware that in the long run, literature academics are often the ones who determine which works continue to be read and contine to be seen as important. And perhaps that makes ambitious writers crave the approval of that particular set of eyes? ‘If those people want to read works of literature as documentary records,’ they perhaps at some level think, ‘then documentary records are what we must write.’

Or it might equally be: ‘If stylistic innovation is what impresses them, then stylistic innovation is what I’ll give them’. My point here isn’t so much about the specific notion of literature as contemporary record, as about the way in which (as with my dreams) external observation of a process alters the character of the process itself. Literary academics enjoy intertextuality, for instance (the way one text refers to, and plays with, other texts), and I’ve certainly come across works of fiction that played with intertextuality in such an arch and knowing way that it reminded me of a child trying to impress grown ups.

My hunch is, though, that in the long-run, the great books – the ones that students of literature end up finding interesting in the future – actually won’t turn out to be the ones that played too much to that particular gallery. After all, whether intentionally or not, any book is a document of its times and any book includes resonances, shadows and borrowings from other works, so, with or without self-conscious gallery-playing, there will always be things for the literary studies people to explore. And the great books of the past were written without having to consider that particular gaze.

“An academic-led literature is a gentrified suburb,” wrote the Australian poet, Les Murray, and I’m inclined to agree with him. Gentrified suburbs tend to be pretty and nice to live in, but, with their self-consciousness, their inhibitions, their niggling social anxiety, no one would call them the most exciting places on Earth.

Yes or no?

A visit to my daughter in Edinburgh has made me think about the Scottish independence referendum coming up in September. Like a lot of English people, I hadn’t paid much attention to it until recently, but am now realising that this is a pretty big thing, not only for Scotland, but for the whole UK.

Every friend of mine that I’ve discussed this with, English and Scottish, is strongly against Scottish independence, but I’m not so sure. The strongest argument I’ve heard against voting yes is that independence would cater to a certain narrow, chauvinist anti-Englishness which (or so I’m told by Scottish friends) is one of the less appealing aspects of Scottish life: a parochial, small-town dislike of anything from outside. I’ve no way of judging how large a part that plays in the current wave of separatism.

That aside, though, I can see several good reasons for voting yes. The first is simply that the wider the base of a pyramid, the higher is its tip. A smaller country can be more accountable to its people – you have more say if you’re one of five million voters than if you’re one of sixty million – and should require fewer tiers of hierarchy between top and bottom. Of course a global economy means that all countries have to participate in supranational institutions, and this creates additional pyramids that rise up above the national level, but I can’t see that it would be to the disadvantage of Scotland to have its own seat at the table in those institutions, rather than to be represented by the government of a nation within which Scotland is only a small constituent part.

The second reason I can see for voting yes lies, oddly enough, in some of the arguments and positions that are put forward for voting no. Scotland might not be viable on its own (Why not? It’s similar in population to Denmark or Norway, and is one of the better-off countries in Europe.) Scotland might not be allowed to join the EU. (Oh yeah? When the EU has just agreed to admit Croatia, smaller in population than Scotland and with well under half the GDP?) Scotland cannot have a currency union with the rest of the UK. (Except that a UK minister has already contradicted this.) I hear in these messages the tone of a clingy parent who tries to undermine her child’s confidence because she is afraid to let the child go: ‘It’s a nasty difficult world out there. You’d be much better off at home with mum.’ And it seems to me that a strong argument for ‘yes’ is simply the confidence that Scotland would gain as a country when it discovered that it could manage perfectly well on its own. (As of course it would: economics is not an exact science and no one can really know the long-term consequences when there are so many variables involved, but it is surely obvious that Scotland would be perfectly viable either way?)

And this brings me to my third argument for a yes vote, one I’ve not heard anyone express before, which is simply that change can be fun. All countries are works of the imagination. A disparate bunch of people are included within a more-or-less arbitrary border, and if all goes well, over time they begin to think of themselves as a kind of community. Isn’t it refreshing sometimes to reimagine things, just as it can be refreshing to redecorate a room, or move house, or end a relationship that has lost its spark? Does there have to be a practical reason? An independent Scotland would be an interesting new project for the people of Scotland to take on (and would incidentally create an interesting new project for the rest of the UK). Doesn’t the question really boil down to whether they fancy it or not, rather than whether it would be ‘good’ or ‘bad’?

A rigged game

In my other life (I work part-time as a lecturer), I’ve sometimes used a rigged monopoly game – a game where one person starts off with, say, ten times as much money as the other, as a way of representing the unfairness of life. I used it in a text book too. The point I wanted to make was not only that life is unfair, but that it is so unfair that, if it was a game, most of us would refuse to play.

I only recently found out (thanks to Thure Etzold) that a rigged monopology game has actually been used as the basis of a psychological experiment to explore the effect of wealth on human behaviour. Paul Piff observed games of monopoly between pairs of players, randomly assigned to advantaged and disadvantated positions. Even though they knew the game was rigged to make it virtually certain that they would win, advantaged players would start to act in a more arrogant way towards their adversary. If we are doing better than another person, the experiment seems to suggest, we start to feel superior to them, even if our rational head knows that our success is none of our doing. Financial success means status, and status means we can push other people around.

This is consistent with other studies by Piff in which he found that, for instance, expensive cars are less likely to stop at pedestrian crossings than cheaper ones, and that better-off people in psychological experiments are more likely than poorer ones to help themselves to sweets that they have been specifically told are there to give to children in another study. If you haven’t come across this work, there’s a PBS video here, and an article here.

Join us, and you’ll be saved

One of Richard Dawkins’ Twitter homilies recently irritated me sufficiently to engage in a little tweeted debate with him and some of his followers. 140 characters don’t exactly lend themselves to nuanced discussion, however, so here are my more measured thoughts.

“As I repeatedly said [Dawkins wrote], some atheists do bad things. But it is not their atheism that drives them to it. Religion can do that.”

It’s obvious that horrific things are indeed done in the name of various religions. I think of the Taliban, the Spanish Inquisition, the Magdalene Laundries. But horrific things have also been done in the name of atheistical regimes who believed (as Dawkins does) that religion is harmful. The following is from Wikipedia, so feel free to question its accuracy, but it concurs with what I have understood to be the case from other reading.

State atheism in the Soviet Union was known as gosateizm,^[2] and was based on the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. As the founder of the Soviet state, V. I. Lenin, put it:

Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.^[6]

Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted.^[7]

And this is about the cultural revolution in China:

Marxist-Leninist ideology was opposed to religion, and people were told to become atheists from the early days of Communist rule. During the Destruction of Four Olds campaign, religious affairs of all types were discouraged by Red Guards, and practitioners persecuted. Temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, and cemeteries were closed down and sometimes converted to other uses, looted, and destroyed.^[30] Marxist propaganda depicted Buddhism as superstition, and religion was looked upon as a means of hostile foreign infiltration, as well as an instrument of the ‘ruling class’.^[31] Chinese Marxists declared ‘the death of God’, and considered religion a defilement of the Chinese communist vision. Clergy were arrested and sent to camps; many Tibetan Buddhists were forced to participate in the destruction of their monasteries at gunpoint.^[31]

Of course there are all kinds of complex socio-political reasons why the Soviet and Chinese authorities felt the need to persecute religions (the Chinese still do, of course, notably in the case of the Falun Gong) but the same kind of thing can be said about the activities of the Inquisition or the Taliban. There’s always a political agenda and a political context for everything but if the latter can (somewhat simplistically) be described as bad things driven by religion, then it seems to me that the former can be also be described (also simplistically) not just as ‘atheists doing bad things’ but as bad things driven by atheism.

Richard Dawkins would be perfectly entitled to say that this isn’t his kind of atheism at all, and I know it isn’t. (Many Marxists, I know, would also say it wasn’t their kind of Marxism!) But in that case aren’t religious people equally entitled to say the the Inquisition isn’t their kind of religion? It’s pretty meaningless to generalise either about ‘religion’ or about ‘atheism’, since both embrace a vast range of possible worldviews, but if we are going to lump all these worldviews together into these two camps, then it really isn’t fair (though it is, unfortunately, extremely human) for one camp or the other to point to its own good guys and compare them to the other camp’s bad guys.

What I object to in Dawkins’ position isn’t atheism – I suppose I’m an atheist myself, if we have to use these simplistic categories – nor his robust critique of the unpleasant aspects of religion: I’m confident that no one who’s read The Holy Machine would suggest that I’m in any way soft on those. What I’m objecting to is the implication that ‘atheism’ (which after all just means not believing in God) is in some magical way incapable of being a pretext for bad things. This seems to me curiously reminiscent of certain of the less attractive aspects of organised religion. Join us, and you’ll be saved!

140 characters wasn’t enough, and nor is this either. The Holy Machine explores this stuff further, and I tried to critique in it a kind of intolerant literal-mindedness which can be found both among fundementalist religions and among some atheists.

None of us know the truth about the universe, not even Richard Dawkins, and we should be as generous as we can towards one another’s faltering attempts to glimpse it.

Voices from Eden

There is already a British audio book version of Dark Eden (read by Oliver Hembrough and Jessica Martin), but I’m very much looking forward to hearing the new US audio book from Random House Audio which is still under development. This will involve 8 actors, so that the book’s various narrators can all have different voices, but what is particularly intriguing about it is that the producer Janet Stark and her cast of actors are attempting to develop a whole new Eden accent for the recording.

What will this sound like? Everyone in Eden is descended from just two people – a white man from Brooklyn, New York, and a black woman from Peckham in South London – so one thing that we can be sure of is that the accent will bear traces of both those different sources. During the early years too, the entire human population of Eden consisted of a single family – mum, dad, kids – and some of the characteristics of Eden English derive from that fact. Parents with little kids tend to simplify their speech, even when speaking to one another, and this effect would be even more pronounced in the absence of other adults (or the written word) to pull the speech of family members back in the direction of adult norms. This is the source of the use of double adjectives for emphasis – something that little children often do – and the tendency to drop direct articles, but it will have had an effect too on pronunciation and on the rhythms of Eden speech.

But all that is only part of the story. The accent of Eden would not just be a blend of its two sources. People play with language, change it like clothes. They get bored with saying things one way, and try another. New things appear and become cool, others fade out of use. Who could have predicted the trend towards a rising inflection at the end of a sentence in spoken English here on Earth, or the more recent fashion of beginning sentences with the word ‘So’? The people of Eden have lived in isolation for 160 years. Less than 160 years after white settlers first arrived in Australia, Australian English had developed its own distinct and instantly recognisable accent, and that was in spite of continuing contact with the mother country, and continuing large scale migration (even today more than 10% of Australians were born in the UK).

I think the spoken language of Eden would be slow. Both the source accents are fast, clipped and urban, but Eden folk are as rustic as it is possible to be, and rustic people tend to speak slowly (think Somerset, Queensland or Alabama). I think too that it would be more musical, more singsong. These are people with no TV, no books, no video games, no movies. The repetition of oral traditions is much more important to them than it is to us. I think they would savour language and linger over it in a way that we don’t.

As to those double adjectives which everyone notices (and some people hate!), I hear them with the first adjective emphasised and drawn out, with a slight fall at the end towards the lower, shorter repetition: B-I-I-I-G big.

But then again, sometimes Eden folk do it the other way round. They just feel like it. That’s what humans are like.

The blog tour continued

Following on from my post in this series, Tony Ballantyne and Una McCormack were the next links in the chain. Links to their posts are below. There are lots of things they say that apply equally well to me. (I guess you expect that with friends!)

Here’s Una’s post. ‘…What the trappings of science fiction allow me to do,’ she writes, ‘is move from the particularities of specific real-world situations in order to think abstractly about… well, everything really…’ Exactly so!

And here’s Tony’s. ‘…I get ideas all the time,’ he writes, ‘and I write them down to be used later, but every so often one idea collides with another and I suddenly get really excited and I just have to begin writing.’ Precisely, and without that collision, there’s no story. It’s the lightning bolt that brings it to life.

The Emperor’s Last Laugh

Because of my new-found interest in drawing, my wife gave me a book recently called A Short Book about Drawing, by Andrew Marr, the TV journalist, who turns out to be a pretty good drawer. It’s a charming book, and much of it is simply about the pleasure to be obtained from the act of drawing itself, but at one point Marr speaks with some regret about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on our conception of art, and about all that has since emerged ‘like a vast glittery spout of magma from Duchamp’s urinal.’

He’s referring to the urinal which, in 1917, Duchamp signed with the name ‘R.Mutt’ and decreed to be a work of art called ‘Fountain’. A work of art from then on wasn’t necessarily a painting or a sculpture. It didn’t even have to be something that the artist had made. It could be anything that an artist chose to designate as such. Indeed, from what I’ve read, Duchamp deliberately chose objects for this purpose which had no meaning or significance to him at all. What a strange, violent, mocking thing to do! It’s as if I were to reprint a telephone directory, call it ‘Contact’ and declare it to be my next novel – and people were to accept it as such, and make themselves read it and think about it as if it meant something!

If anything can be a work of art if an artist says it is (including an object that means nothing even to the artist!) this raises the question of who gets to be an artist. Who gets this strange fetishistic power? In the past artists would have been identifiable to most people, at least to some extent, by the skill evident in their work. Some artists were doubtless much better than others at acquiring wealthy patrons, but some degree of skill in the creation of images would have been a necessary prerequisite also. Now this was no longer the case. An artist could be created by patronage alone. With beauty and meaning set aside, the wealthy could create artists out of whomever they chose, and those artists could then return the favour by taking trivial objects and turning them, for the wealthy, into a kind of gold.

The emperor gets the last laugh, after all. Who cares if the clothes are real or not, as long as they can be bought and sold?

Drawing

I’ve started going to drawing classes, one of my better ideas. Drawing turns out to be a wonderfully engrossing and calming activity.

I particular enjoy drawing electric-lit scenes in charcoal, a medium that allows you to create a sense of luminousness by covering the paper in layers of grey and then removing it in patches with a putty rubber to create areas of brightness.

This is one of my better efforts so far: a glass ball in front of a lamp.

I’m hoping that in due course I might be able to use this sort of technique to draw some of the creatures and trees of Eden, lit by their own luminosity or the luminosity of other organisms nearby. That’s going to be a while though, because it is hard enough drawing what is actually in front of me.

In fact the exact thing that’s hard about this kind of drawing is that you must draw what’s in front of you, and forget what’s in your head. The only way I could do the glass ball in the picture above (and, let’s be honest, I’m pretty damn pleased with it) is by stopping thinking about it as a glass ball and just noticing the various different shades of light and darkness and the shapes they made.

Happiness

I was reading a book in a warm conservatory when a splash of water fell on me. I looked up, thinking the roof was leaking and that I might need to move. But the water had come from a drop of condensation that was rolling down the underside of the glass roof, collecting more moisture as it went along. It had become too heavy for its own surface tension to be able to hold it up against the pull of gravity.

It dripped a second time and a third, and then equilibrium was restored. The droplet was no longer too heavy to hold itself up, and it carried on down the roof, leaving behind it a kind of snail trail as it passed through steamed up patches. There were a whole lot of these snail trails up there, descending the roof at various angles, and each one was lined with a series of small static droplets like glass beads, which the larger rolling droplets seemed to leave behind themselves at more or less regular intervals.

I spent some time looking up at this little system powered by heat and gravity, lazily mulling over the physics of it all, when I noticed that, beyond the glass, a series of ragged clouds were passing rapidly across the blue sky above me, one after another.

I suddenly felt entirely at peace.